In
the words of Elizabeth Warren, “women have had it” with guys like
Trump, and the others who grab, insult and harass us. There’s a new
defiance in the air

When a man gropes you on a subway.
If a stranger tells you to smile as you walk down the street. When
someone calls you a bitch because you turned them down at a bar. The
decision of whether to speak up or push back is made in a split second,
and for a lot of women, it’s just not worth it.The person that
just harassed you might get even more aggressive if confronted. Besides,
what difference will it make, you think. Why spend energy on a person
like this?

As the election looms closer and women continue to come
forward to accuse Donald Trump of assault, I’ve noticed a shift in the
way women are talking
about dealing with these all-too-common indignities. They’re not just
fed up with the harassment itself, but with the resigned feeling that
this is just the way things are.

More and more, women are sharing
stories of speaking up in those moments – and crediting Trump’s misogyny
with what they did. Carolina Siede, writing at Quartz, described being leered at by a man one evening and changing her usual tactic of not “rocking the boat”.

As we sat in uncomfortable silence, I began to think again about Donald Trump.
I thought about the women he’d groped. I thought about the men who,
through their ignorance or denial, enable this behavior to happen. I
thought about Michelle Obama telling women and girls that they deserve
dignity and respect too. And I decided enough was enough.

Writer Rebecca Solnit shared a similar story on Facebook
from a woman who was called a “cunt” by a stranger and decided to
confront him. “Are you going to tell me it was just locker room talk?,”
she asked.There’s more talk, too, of the less obvious kinds of harassment and assault. A woman on Twitter this week described a man caressing her calf
as she walked by him on an airplane, for example. When we think of
groping what comes to mind is someone grabbing “private” areas. But if
it’s another person’s body – it is private.

Those
of us who helped Nixon win by failing to support the better candidate
acted as if voting in a presidential election was a simple matter of
morality.

By Henry WeinsteinOctober 21, 2016When
I stepped into the polling booth on Nov. 5, 1968, to cast my first vote
for president, I was an angry Berkeley law student active in a variety
of causes, including the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and
endeavors to enable California farmworkers to unionize.

I did not like either of the major candidates. Richard Nixon
and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, promised to bring an unholy version
of “law and order” to our country, just as Republican candidate Donald Trump is hawking now.

I also had no enthusiasm for Democratic candidate Hubert H. Humphrey. Until he became vice president under Lyndon Johnson,
I admired Humphrey, the Minnesota senator who had championed civil
rights. But Triple H morphed into Johnson's surrogate, supporting an
unwise, immoral war in Vietnam.

A devastating Bill Mauldin cartoon
crystallized my feelings about Humphrey’s noxious role. It depicted
Humphrey speaking to a Vietnamese woman seeking shelter from American
bombs in foxhole. The caption: “Ma'am, I represent The Great Society.”

My
hostility to Humphrey intensified during the Democratic convention when
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's gendarmes beat demonstrators with
truncheons on city streets, prompting Connecticut Sen. Abe Ribicoff to
blast the police's “Gestapo” tactics in a speech from the convention
podium. In response, Daley, a Humphrey backer, brandished his middle
finger.

So, what to do on Nov. 5? Be practical, settle for half a
loaf with Humphrey? Or “take a stand on principle,” not succumb to
voting for “the lesser of two evils” and declare, in effect, “it really
doesn't make a difference?”

My emotions prevailed. I wrote in Dick
Gregory, an African American comedian who championed civil rights and
opposed the war. Some friends voted for Black Panther Minister of
Information Eldridge Cleaver, the Peace and Freedom Party candidate. We
walked out of our polling places feeling righteous.

In California,
the smattering of votes garnered by Cleaver (27,707) and Gregory
(3,230) had no impact on the outcome. Nixon defeated Humphrey by 223,000
votes. But there were people like us across the country who did not
take the long view and consequently failed to do what Humphrey needed to
win — register voters, talk to neighbors, canvas to increase
election-day turnout. Nationally, Nixon prevailed — 31.7 million votes
to 31.2 million votes.

Thousands
of US citizens may have been targeted in a huge tax scam run from call
centres in Mumbai, where hundreds of workers were allegedly trained to
speak in American accents in order to steal tens of millions of dollars,
Indian police have said.

About 700 people are being investigated
over what is believed to have been one of the biggest such scams in
India’s history, which involved workers posing as US tax officials,
according to Paramvir Singh, the police commissioner of Thane.

“Seventy
workers have been formally arrested and around 630 others are being
investigated,” Singh said. “We expect that many more people will be
arrested.”

On Tuesday night about 200 officers raided nine
premises in India’s financial capital. Police believe the alleged scam
was run from the call centres, where workers pretended to be officials
from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the US tax authority.

Employees
would allegedly tell American citizens that they had defaulted on tax
payments and were facing prosecution by the IRS. “They would give an
American name and a batch number and tell the [US] citizen that they
owed the authorities $4,000, $5,000 or $10,000,” said Singh.“They
were instructed to stay on the phone and told that their homes would be
raided by police within 30 minutes if they hung up. They made threats,
they said: ‘You have to pay, otherwise you will lose your job, your
money, your house.’”

After allegedly duping the victims into
revealing their bank details they would then withdraw money from their
accounts, police said. The victims were told to stay on the call and go
to their nearest Target or Walmart store, where they would buy a prepaid
cash card, load thousands of dollars on to it and then transfer the
money to an American bank account.

Police have not revealed the
amount of money that was stolen, or whether citizens from other
countries had been targeted. But Singh said the call centres were
running for more than a year and are estimated to have conned billions
of rupees out of thousands of people.

Instead of going cautious and playing it safe, Clinton leaned hard toward feminism in the final debate with Trump

Hillary
Clinton frequently gets characterized as an overly cautious politician,
afraid to go out on a limb and swift to scurry towards some ill-defined
“middle” at the first sign of conflict. Part of that reputation is due
to people’s mistaking her for her husband. But part of it is her own
fault, as she tended to take that approach in the 2008 Democratic
primaries, leaving it to Barack Obama to portray himself as more
liberal, even though Clinton was actually somewhat to the left of her primary opponent.

In
Wednesday night’s debate — thankfully the last of this endless election
season — Clinton proved her detractors wrong. Her opponent this time,
Republican Donald Trump, is an obnoxious misogynist who literally
bragged during the debate that he didn’t even apologize to his wife
after a tape came out featuring him bragging about sexually assaulting
women. Despite this, Trump continues to poll well with more than 40
percent of voters.

A more skittish politician would see that and
assume the country is still incredibly sexist and not ready for a
strongly feminist message and try to find some middle-ground way
to tiptoe around the issue of women’s equality.

Clinton did the
opposite. Faced with a misogynistic pig with a long record of belittling
and objectifying women, Clinton leaned into the idea that voters want a
feminist in office. (After all, the last president they elected is one!)
Despite decades of pressure from the media to step back, soften her
voice, be more submissive and bake more cookies, Clinton made absolutely
sure that the debate-watching audience could not doubt her commitment
to feminism.

“In the 1990s, I went to Beijing and I said women’s
rights are human rights,” Clinton reminded audiences. Younger voters may
not know how controversial
that was at the time. But if that statement seems obvious now, it’s in
no small part because Clinton had the ovaries to say it out loud then on
a prominent international stage.

It took more than a year to get
here, but finally Clinton got to be in a debate in which she was
directly asked about abortion rights, and she offered a full-throated
defense of reproductive rights.

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

Sarah SmarshThursday 13 October 2016Last
March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three
hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her
first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could
have deterred her. Betty – a white woman who left school after ninth
grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in
severe poverty – wanted to vote.

So she waited with busted knees
that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced
emphysema and the false teeth she’s had since her late 20s – both
markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before
Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she
discovered she was pregnant by a man she’d fled after he broke her jaw.

Betty
worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial
system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and
raped. As a result, it’s hard to faze her, but she has pronounced
Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath “whose mouth overloads his ass”.No one loathes Trump – who suggested women should be punished
for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people
she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and
indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility – more than she.

Yet,
it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a
particular fixation among the chattering class during this election:
what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?

Hard
numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory
that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that
working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted
by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic
distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According
to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher
unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot;
those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward
mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to
be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears
to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and
support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump
campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000
– higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters.
Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national
average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political
scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.

These
facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after
story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating
demagogue.

In
a 1969 speech, then-President Richard Nixon directly addressed the
“silent majority” of Americans who he hoped would support his middle
path policy on Vietnam. The speech itself, if you read it, is rather
banal and unremarkable, but the turn of phrase came to be a powerful
icon of the politics of the era. At a time when American society seemed
in many ways to be pulling apart, Nixon argued for stability.

And with that phrase, he offered recognition
to the large number of Americans who were neither Black Panthers nor
Klansmen, neither war hawks nor hippies, just basically normal
middle-class white people who rejected Jim Crow without embracing Black
Power, disliked the war but disliked communism even more.

Nixon’s
presidency itself descended into oblivion, but his silent majority of
hard hats and conformists carried forward, dominating American politics
for the rest of the 20th century. Under George W. Bush, Republican
rhetoric took a different turn — more overtly pious and messianic — but
in the wake of Bushism’s self-discrediting collapse, Nixonian themes
have strongly reemerged under the leadership of Donald Trump.

But
though Trumpniks are certainly the demographic descendants of Nixon’s
white working-class silent majority, the basic reality is that they are
anything but silent. Trump’s rallies are, as Trump would be the first to
tell you, enormous, raucous affairs. He brings in big ratings. He
attracts constant coverage, and so do his supporters, in the form of
endlessly writerly explorations of the agonizing anxieties of “Trump
Country” communities afflicted by everything from deindustrialization to opiate addiction to an influx of immigrants from the Dominican Republic.

Nor,
crucially, are the Trumpniks a majority. Polls give every indication
that Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump, just as she beat Bernie
Sanders — who also drew larger rally crowds and more think pieces than
she did — in the Democratic primary. Clinton crowds aren’t as big, and
her voters aren’t as loud or as interesting to the media. But there sure
are a lot of them. And it’s about time we acknowledge them and their
emergence as a new silent majority that reelected America’s first black
president and is poised to elect its first woman.

Seeking oversight, civil rights protections and transparency.

The
charter school industry is coming under increased attack by national
civil rights leaders for its unequal and antidemocratic practices in the
communities it purports to help by privatizing K-12 schools.

On Saturday, the board of directors at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ratified a resolution
passed this summer at its national convention calling for a moratorium
on charter expansion and strengthening charter oversight. The NAACP vote
came after intense lobbying against the resolution from the industry
and its allies, including editorials in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, a letter from black pro-charter legislators from California (where the sector gets almost anything it wants), and out-of-state protesters who were bused in and interrupted the NAACP’s proceedings.

“We
are moving forward to require that charter schools receive the same
level of oversight, civil rights protections and provide the same level
of transparency, and we require the same of traditional public schools,”
said Roslyn M. Brock, NAACP chair, in a statement
after the 63-member national board vote. “Our decision today is driven
by a long-held principle and policy of the NAACP that high-quality,
free, public education should be afforded to all children.”

“The
NAACP’s resolution is not inspired by ideological opposition to charter
schools but by our historical support of public schools—as well as
today’s data and the present experience of NAACP branches in nearly
every school district in the nation,” said Cornell William Brooks, NAACP
president and CEO. “Our NAACP members, who as citizen advocates, not
professional lobbyists, are those who attend school board meetings,
engage with state legislatures and support both parents and teachers.”

There
are now 6,700 charter schools across the country, educating 3 million
students. The initial idea for charters was to create locally run
experimental schools. However, as the industry has grown, especially
since 2000, it has become dominated by corporate educational chains and
franchises with ambitions to become national brands.

In a move increasingly typical of the K-12 privatization industry, the charter industry slammed the NAACP, claiming the industry is on the side of the children. This claim ignores what has become obvious to many
in education circles: that charters are siphoning billions of public
funds away from traditional public schools and leaving behind a trail of
deep problems that need to be addressed, including unequal admissions
and overly test-centered academics; private school boards replacing
locally elected and appointed officials; and a business model that
encourages fiscal corruption and self-dealing at taxpayer expense.

Statement by Larry T. Decker, Executive Director of the Secular Coalition for America

“Following
the release of a tape in which he casually discusses sexual assault,
presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that; “No one
has more respect for women than I do.” Trump invoked this talking point
yet again at last night’s presidential debate
shortly after promising to appoint Supreme Court Justices who would
overturn Roe. v. Wade. Donald Trump cannot claim women do not have the
right to control their own bodies and, barely thirty minutes later,
boast about how much he respects women. The core of Trump’s radical
anti-choice position is the belief women’s voices can be disregarded and
their medical decisions made by lawmakers. In defending this stance,
Trump employed discredited myths about abortion care similar to those used by the religious right leaders who have advised his campaign.

If
Donald Trump is at all curious what a platform respecting women would
look like, it was displayed at the podium across from his by Hillary
Clinton. When asked what sorts of justices she would look to appoint to
the Supreme Court, Secretary Clinton did not hesitate to stress that any
appointment she makes to the court will be committed to upholding Roe
v. Wade. We applaud Clinton’s unequivocal and bold defense of a woman’s
right to choose. Lawmakers have no right to impose their personal
religious beliefs onto anyone, including women seeking access to
abortion care. To do so is blatantly unconstitutional and deeply
disrespectful.”

Police
arrest more people for drug possession than any other crime in America.
Every 25 seconds someone is arrested for possessing drugs for their own
use, amounting to 1.25 million arrests per year. These numbers tell a
tale of ruined lives, destroyed families, and communities suffering
under a suffocating police presence.

For the past year I have been
investigating how the law enforcement approach to personal drug use has
failed. The resulting report, “Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States,”
calls on state legislatures and Congress to decriminalize personal drug
use and possession. It comes at a time when the country is recognizing
that the so-called “war on drugs” hasn’t stopped drug dependence and
that we desperately need to address the problems of mass incarceration,
race, policing, and drug policy.

For personal drug use, it is time to replace our criminal justice model with a public health one instead.

The
consequences of arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating people for
personal drug use are devastating. I met people who were prosecuted for
tiny amounts of drugs, in one case an amount so small that the
laboratory could not even weigh it and simply called it “trace.” That
man was sentenced to 15 years in Texas.

On any given day, nearly
140,000 people are behind bars for drug possession, while tens of
thousands more are cycling through jails and prisons or struggling to
make ends meet on probation or parole. Still others are serving
sentences for other offenses that have been lengthened because of a
prior conviction for drug possession. A conviction for drug possession
can keep people from accessing welfare assistance and even the voting
booth. It can also subject them to stigma and discrimination by
potential landlords, employers, and peers.

I met a woman I’ll call
“Nicole” in the Harris County Jail in Texas. Nicole was detained
pretrial for months on felony drug possession charges for residue inside
paraphernalia. While she was in jail, her newborn learned to sit up on
her own. When the baby visited jail, she couldn’t feel her mother’s
touch because there was glass between them.

Nicole ultimately pled
guilty to possession of 0.01 grams of heroin. She would return to her
children later that year, but as a “felon” and “drug offender.” She
would have to drop out of school because she no longer qualified for
financial aid. She would no longer be able to have a lease in her name
and would have trouble finding a job. And she would no longer qualify
for the food stamps she had relied on to feed her family.

Forty-five
years after the “war on drugs” was declared, rates of drug use haven’t
significantly declined, and criminalization hasn’t stopped drug
dependence. In fact, criminalization has driven drug use underground,
making it harder for people who use drugs to access the help they
sometimes really want and need. The “war on drugs” has caused enormous
harm to individuals and families — harm that often outstrips the harm of
drug use itself. And it has made communities less safe by deeply
corroding the relationship between police and communities of color and
focusing precious law enforcement resources on nonviolent drug use
instead of violent crimes, less than half of which result in an arrest.

Our
research also reiterates that enforcement of U.S. drug laws and policy
discriminates against communities of color. Although Black and white
people use drugs at equivalent rates, a Black person is 2.5 times more
likely to be arrested for drug possession. In many states that ratio is
significantly higher. In Manhattan, a Black person is 11 times more
likely to be arrested for drug possession than a white person.

Providence,
R.I. — Last semester, a group came to Providence to speak against
admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the president of the Brown
Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to stage a
counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the planning
for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me
because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.

That
was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized this
way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a petition against
a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because one of
the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even though the event
was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, who planned to
talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. Anti-Zionist
students would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a
Jewish group to participate in that conversation.

Of
course, I still believe in the importance of accepting refugees,
combating discrimination, abolishing racist law enforcement practices
and other causes. Nevertheless, it’s painful that Jewish issues are shut
out of these movements. Jewish rights belong in any broad movement to
fight oppression.

My
fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like
me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge the swastikas
that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or left on
chalkboards. They don’t hear students accusing me of killing Jesus.
They don’t notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as
Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hezbollah, as mine
have.

Nor
do they speak against the anti-Semitism in American culture. Even as
they rightfully protest hate crimes against Muslim Americans and
discrimination against black people, they wrongfully dismiss attacks on
Jews (who are the most frequent targets of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States) and increasing anti-Semitism in the American political arena, as can be seen in Donald Trump’sflirtations with the “alt-right.” They don’t take issue with calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

In past elections, presidential candidates
have soft-pedaled their views on the subject. This time, Mrs. Clinton
sounded resolute and even righteous about defending a woman’s right to
control one of the most “intimate and difficult” decisions about her
health care.

Mr. Trump used strong language, too, describing how
he wants to prevent the ripping of “the baby out of the womb” on the
last day of pregnancy. This is what his base wants to hear: Many
Republicans, especially religious ones, cite the prospect of future
nominations to the court as their reason for supporting Mr. Trump,
despite their distaste for, oh, just about everything else about him. So
he checked that box. Though oddly, he didn’t simply say “yes” when the
moderator, Chris Wallace, asked whether he wanted the Supreme Court to
overturn Roe v. Wade.

Maybe his old pro-choice self couldn’t quite
bear to say it. Or maybe he wanted to soften his stance a bit — I heard
a bit of moderation in his promise to appoint “pro-life judges” who
would send the issue “back to the states.”

Mrs. Clinton talked to
her base, too. She talked about her opposition, and Trump’s support, for
defunding Planned Parenthood; the polls are with her on that one. She
got in a gibe, reminding Mr. Trump of his (quickly retracted) statement
of support for punishing women who seek abortions. (It’s a fairly
logical end once you go down the road of outlawing the procedure, but
abortion opponents are trained to talk about jailing “abortionists” not
women.)

She described the “most heartbreaking” circumstances that
often led women to late-term abortion: risk to their own life or health,
or the discovery of serious birth defects. That’s not the only reason
for abortion after the first trimester, but it’s a significant issue.

I’ll
confess I felt a small thrill: More than at any big moment since the
convention, Mrs. Clinton owned her feminism. She sounded like the first
woman running for president, defending other women — our autonomy and
our control of our own bodies.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

I've long been bothered by the reduction of woman from meaning an
adult female to gender. This tends to reduce women to being people who
fill a certain role that defines adult female people as the
second or lesser sex. (See Simone de Beauvoir. Her book is a slog to
get through but is one of the best analyses of how gender oppresses
women ever written.)

We have had over 40 years of right wing back
lash against the progressive reforms of the 1960s. This war against the
1960s has been anti-woman, anti-people of color, anti-LGBT and
anti-Semitic.

Of course women are people. Further these women
come in all shapes and sizes. They aren't women because of their
adherence to corporate ideals of femininity.

Trump's insistence
upon reducing women to sex objects valuable only as possessions is based
solidly upon gender, gender, gender and the idea that women are women
based on their adherence to a social role, that women who step outside
that role, like Hillary Clinton, are some how not women.From Salon:http://www.salon.com/2016/10/13/are-women-people/

The presidential election has turned into a referendum on whether women are full human beings or objects men own

With
the benefit of hours-old hindsight, it now seems inevitable that, with
less than a month to go before the United States likely elects its first
female president, the top trending topic on Twitter would be #repealthe19th. The hashtag was started by angry supporters of Republican candidate Donald Trump in response to a FiveThirtyEight analysis by Nate Silver
showing that Trump would win in a landslide if women didn’t have the
right to vote. That led to this demand, facetious or otherwise, that the
United States end women’s suffrage.

For
good reason, Trump’s rise has largely been attributed to the forces of
white nationalism engaged in a backlash against the first black
president and growing racial diversity. But the past couple of weeks
have demonstrated that this election is also a referendum on the
question: Are women people?

It’s worth taking a moment to go back all the way to last week and consider Trump’s comments about the wrongful conviction of five teens, known as the Central Park Five,
for the rape and beating of a jogger in 1989. Trump was heavily
involved in the case at the time, taking out ads demanding the death
penalty for the defendants. He refuses to apologize even in the face of
overwhelming evidence that someone else committed the crime.

“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said to CNN’s Miguel Marquez last week. He did not acknowledge extensive research showing
that the police interrogation techniques that the five teenagers were
subjected to are well known for causing false confessions.

Shortly
after Trump said this, the “grab them by the pussy” “Access Hollywood”
video was released. In it, Trump confessed — bragged, really — to its
NBC host Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women and getting away
with it.

Unlike the confessions of the Central Park Five, Trump’s
confession was not coerced. On the contrary, he comes across as a man
who is dying to talk about how he can do whatever he wants to women.

And yet, Trump and his allies are dismissing his remarks as “locker-room talk” and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough is wanking on that he’s “skeptical about the timing of all of this.”

The double standard in play here is largely about race, of course. As Jamelle Bouie of Slate noted, Trump has a history of painting black people “as helpless brutes leading disordered, degenerate lives.”

But it also goes back to Trump and his supporters treating women not as people but as objects to be owned and controlled by men.

If
you look at women that way, the attitudes of Trump and his supporters
make sense. Trump gets to grab all the pussy he wants because women’s
bodies are objects put on this planet for his personal use. With the
Central Park case, the truth of what happened matters less to Trump than
the opportunity to use a woman’s body in his racialized drama about the
dangers that black men supposedly pose to white men’s women.

‘He
did not say the word “sexual assault”’, ‘I think that’s a stretch’ and
‘I’m not a lawyer’ among excuses trotted out by aides and surrogates
about lewd comments

The 2005 tape of Donald Trump
bragging that his celebrity status allowed him to grope women with
abandon has sent the Republican party reeling. But on Sunday night, the
top spokespeople for the GOP and the Trump campaign had recovered their
wits long enough to dispute whether Trump was actually describing a
“sexual assault” in the 11-year-old recording.

The
tape, recorded while Trump and NBC host Billy Bush rode a bus to the
set of Access Hollywood, captured Trump making lewd comments about actor
Arianne Zucker – and women in general – while Bush egged him on.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson